Did you see my mug in the Toronto Star? I was there. I swear.

Want the back story? Here goes.

I was recently contacted by Sunny Freeman of the Toronto Star, to get my reaction to the Canadian Federal Budget that was recently announced on Tuesday, March 22nd 2016.

I have never been contacted by a major newspaper before, so I was beyond honoured to be included. I was curious to how they found us and they said that I was on a list of Canadian Mommy Bloggers. Sunny, did some research on me and already knew I was pretty yappy and would probably love to be included.

Um. Yeah.

Sunny stated that she would be talking to a few families across Canada in different financial situations and would like to include our family. We chatted a few days before the budget came out about our current situation and if I had any concerns regarding our financial future. And I did.  Our family was one of the few that benefited from Income Splitting that was being removed from the budget. I had also heard rumours that the Fitness and Arts Tax Credit for Children was going to be removed.  Plus, I was also curious about the new Canada Child Benefit, RESP, RRSP, Tax Free Savings Accounts and Katimavik.

After a 20 minute conversation with Sunny, she asked that I send her a family photo, because they didn’t have a photographer in the area.

“Sure. No problem.” I replied.  Then I started to scour our family photos.

This is when things went a bit squirrely.

Hmmmmmm.

Crap.  When was the last time we took a family photo? I searched all our photo’s.

HOW CAN THIS BE? HOW CAN WE ONLY HAVE 3 FAMILY PHOTOS FROM THE LAST 4 YEARS!  WHY AM I NOT IN ANY OF THE PICTURES!

So I sent this…

Then this….

 

Nope. Not going to work.

I was starting to freak out, was my family going to miss our opportunity to be in the Toronto Star because I have failed to get a decent family photo of us.

I was starting to hate myself.

But, I was not going to let this slip through my fingers. So I got my Mom to take a photo of us in the mall.

Still not going to work for the Toronto Star.

Didn’t I have a professional photo?

Confession: I have only had professional photos taken of our family once. Three years ago.

So, I sent them that.

And after a follow up interview with Ben Spurr on Tuesday afternoon, here we are in Wednesday’s paper, with that family photo from 3 years ago.

We weren’t in the online edition, but you can read things a bit better here 

So what did I learn from this experience?

That being in the Toronto Star is pretty cool, especially when they called me a “popular Canadian Mommy Blogger”.

But even more importantly I learned that I really need to get into more of our families photo’s.